Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1989. I haven’t read The Remains of the Day, the book that won, but it doesn’t matter. Cat’s Eye was robbed. Every sentence in the novel’s 498 pages serves the whole beating heart of it. No word is superfluous. Each one is a mini portal, transporting us and the main character, Elaine, back into memories without warning, exactly as Atwood intended.
An interview with Lucy Rose Fischer
The author of The Journalist talks about her new book and its inspiration, about her big brother Jerry Rose, why it took her so long, on ‘ghost-writing’, her own life, and lots more.
A review of Karen Pearlman’s Woman with an Editing Bench, After the Facts, and I want to make a film about women
Collectively, the films present a compelling story of quiet tenacity, talent, and artistic determination. The films are all exquisite, featuring a distinctive blend of narration by Pearlman overlaying an Expressionist montage of documentary images, storytelling, and visual imagery to create seamless shifts between past and present, inner life and outer, and the creative process versus the finished film.
A review of Virginia Woolf and the Women who Shaped her World by Gillian Gill
Gill’s book is a tour de force in bringing together information about Virginia Woolf’s Pattle ancestors and the Thackeray connection; in showing the damaging patriarchal milieu out of which she fought her way, and in highlighting her use of autobiographical material in her novels.
A review of No Finis by Deborah Woodard
Woodard’s sections are simultaneously beautiful and prosaic, terrifying and enraging. The workers are mostly women, many immigrants who spoke little English yet were still forced to testify in English, despite there being an available translator. The women’s conditions, both in the workspace and also as humans, are on full display in the courtroom, and Woodard opens the door for readers to understand the workers positions.
An interview with John Reed
A review of Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy by Cassandra Clare
These stories, focus on Simon although other characters from varying plots are also introduced, discussed and mentioned. We discover more about the Blackthorn children, James Herondale and his family, the secrets of faerie and the journey for Simon as he tries to find who he was, is as a newfound Shadowhunter in the realm of angels and demons.
A review of Mammoth by Chris Flynn
Most of the human characters in the book are real, and an attempt to bring back the Wooly Mammoth is happening, as detailed in the “Epilogus hominum” in order to try and slow global warming. Flynn does a stellar job of bringing together fantasy and history and Mammoth is a joy to read. The book is a cautionary, bold, loving and instructive tale that is mostly historically accurate, always funny, and often poignant.
A review of Fifty Miles by Sheryl St Germain
Reading Fifty Miles brought me to tears a few times, but St Germain courage and determination inspired me and made me reflect as a mother. Fifty Miles is a book that won’t disappoint readers.
A review of My Skin its Own Sky by Gillian Swain
My skin its own sky is an intensely honest book, one that doesn’t shirk at going into dark places or sharing what is unbearable. But always, and throughout this gorgeous collection, in every poem, there is a moment of transformation, where pain becomes beauty. This is the power of the work—by looking and exploring these domestic, broken, and charged moments with the clarity of a poetic gaze, Gillian Swain gives them back to us whole.